Ignoring my previous non-PC's (Sinclair ZX81 and BBC-B), the first PC I ever used was a cobbled-up 286 at work in the early 90's. We used it mainly for doing PCB layouts. It had 640KB of RAM.
Our first PC at home was a 386 (33MHz I think, with a turbo button!). I think it had something like 4 Meg of RAM.
I upgraded that myself with a new motherboard and a 486 proc then a 686 and then a Pentium.
I now run a no-make PC with an AMD X2 proc at 2.7 GHz. Windows XP.
First computer:- Sinclair Spectrum 48k, January 1984. Sold in April 1985 so i could concentrate on my 'O' Level exams.
First 'proper' PC:- Prebuilt Medion desktop, bought March 2003. Pentium 4 2.66, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9000 AGP 64MB, 60GB 5400 RPM HDD. With a few upgrades it was in use until October 2011.
First modem:- The 28k modem built into the Dreamcast console I bought in late 2000, which gave me my first taste of online gaming via Quake 3 and Phantasy Star Online.
I joined the fledgling IBM PC division in early 1984, not long after the PC was first released in Europe. My desk computer was a PC-1 with 16K RAM, 5.25" 360K floppy drive, DOS 1.1, IRMA 3270-emulator card and a monochrome display.
My first actual PC was the legendary Commodore Pet. The very first versions came with an integrated cassette recorder, but were soon replaced with a 20 MB external hard disk (about same size as a modern desktop PC).
This machine only used "Basic" buit the expoerts soon learnt how to do machine code programming via the interface in the "Basic" program.
Open question: who remembers the legendary sys 45056 command. I have not use that in nearly 30 years but I still remember it like yesterday!
The main point is we were set free from mainframes, and could now run our own programs. I did most of my PHD programming on this little beauty.
Now the rise of the machines (IBM PCs).
I used to work for UK Atomic Energy Authority and as a government scientific organisation, we managed to get some IBM XTs a few months before they were on offical release to the public.
The XT was the PC that really changed the world as it was the first Bill Gates MSDOS PC if I remember correctly.
For several years after, a PC was marketed as being 20xXT faster, 30xXT etc (XT benchmark being 1). I wounder how an I7 compares now!
What set the IBM PC free was the ability to run different programs (word perfect was a key superstar).
However, in my opinion, it was the invention of the spreadsheet (Visicalc) that was the genius development. The guy who wrote it changed programming for ever.
The key development was saving the program (your spreadsheet formula), and the data together in one file. You no longer had to store data separately.
To this day, the two top programs by a million miles are Word and Excel (word processing and a spreadsheet). So in many ways as the French say, "the more things change, the more they stay the same".
Comments
Oh? My latest PC is a Gigabit i5 running MacOS 10.6
My first was (1981) a brand new BBC Microcomputer with 6502 processor and 32MB of memory (of which 16 was reserved for the operating system).
Somewhere in between I had a Macintosh Plus with 1MB RAM and an external Hard Drive of 10MB - the whole lot costing a cool £7000.
Once upon a time I acquired an IBM 386 but I used that only for programming EPROMS and EEPROMS.
A lot of memory for 1981.
Yep, yet again somebody confusing KB and MB.
The graphics card used hard wired logic chips (and/or gates) and drove an oscilloscope in XY mode as a primitive scanning display device.
http://doublebit.com/archives/software/challenger1p/images/c1pad.jpg
Our first PC at home was a 386 (33MHz I think, with a turbo button!). I think it had something like 4 Meg of RAM.
I upgraded that myself with a new motherboard and a 486 proc then a 686 and then a Pentium.
I now run a no-make PC with an AMD X2 proc at 2.7 GHz. Windows XP.
First 'proper' PC:- Prebuilt Medion desktop, bought March 2003. Pentium 4 2.66, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9000 AGP 64MB, 60GB 5400 RPM HDD. With a few upgrades it was in use until October 2011.
First modem:- The 28k modem built into the Dreamcast console I bought in late 2000, which gave me my first taste of online gaming via Quake 3 and Phantasy Star Online.
My first actual PC was the legendary Commodore Pet. The very first versions came with an integrated cassette recorder, but were soon replaced with a 20 MB external hard disk (about same size as a modern desktop PC).
This machine only used "Basic" buit the expoerts soon learnt how to do machine code programming via the interface in the "Basic" program.
Open question: who remembers the legendary sys 45056 command. I have not use that in nearly 30 years but I still remember it like yesterday!
The main point is we were set free from mainframes, and could now run our own programs. I did most of my PHD programming on this little beauty.
Now the rise of the machines (IBM PCs).
I used to work for UK Atomic Energy Authority and as a government scientific organisation, we managed to get some IBM XTs a few months before they were on offical release to the public.
The XT was the PC that really changed the world as it was the first Bill Gates MSDOS PC if I remember correctly.
For several years after, a PC was marketed as being 20xXT faster, 30xXT etc (XT benchmark being 1). I wounder how an I7 compares now!
What set the IBM PC free was the ability to run different programs (word perfect was a key superstar).
However, in my opinion, it was the invention of the spreadsheet (Visicalc) that was the genius development. The guy who wrote it changed programming for ever.
The key development was saving the program (your spreadsheet formula), and the data together in one file. You no longer had to store data separately.
To this day, the two top programs by a million miles are Word and Excel (word processing and a spreadsheet). So in many ways as the French say, "the more things change, the more they stay the same".